He was pacing without knowing it. It was so cliched he hated it. Pacing. So hot in here, he thought as he unb.u.t.toned his coat. Over on the nightstand sat an old ragdoll with a ratty worn face. He went over to it and picked it up.

It combusted almost at once into a ma.s.s of tattered cloth, stuffing and roaring red yarn. Cursing, Booker threw it down into the wastepaper basket beside the bed. The flames sprung up, blue in their heat, then died down. The doll burned fitfully for a second or two, then dissolving into white smoke and debris.

He closed his eyes as he fought to put the endless gout of psi back in the fireproofed box of his mind, like the Father had taught him. He hissed through his teeth, concentrating. A thread of sweat tricked down his brow.

Boooker...

He shook his head. He opened his eyes.

Oh Boook...

He looked sideways at the miniature pyre burning at the bottom of the basket. This was ridiculous. What, was he hearing voices in his head like some kind of f.u.c.king psychopath now? He shook his head, but an image came to him with all the shock of memory. He was no more than fourteen, showering, the water a roaring curtain between himself and the rest of the world. Yet the figure penetrated it. At first he thought it was Alek; then a pair of delicate female hands broke through the curtain and touched her white fingertips to his naked ebony chest. He saw her face, eyes flashing black beneath winged brows, a wicked, inviting smile...

Debra...

With a roar, Book threw the basket against the bookshelves, the flotsam of burned stuff filling the room with an acrid, h.e.l.lish stench.

G.o.d help him, he had a sword. And he had another weapon locked none-too-safely inside his mind. And he had no compacture about using either one, so help him. If Alek and dead Debra wanted to play Crispy Critter with him then that was just fine, that was just...f.u.c.king...fine!

The stench of crisping fabric and scorched bone gathered in his nostrils and mouth and throat...

He nearly gagged with it all, with purpose.

He turned from the window and rushed from his brother's cell with scarcely a thought, but an entire mission simmering inside of him, taking form. Yes. He knew what to do.

Downstairs in the parlor he practically fell across Robot and Totty where they were sitting in front of the parlor computer. Home from the hunt and unscathed only because Alek hadn't actually gotten ahold of them, and here they were, plotting their next move already. Maybe they would have had a totally different perspective if they'd seen what was left of Kansas spread all over the rails of three different terminals. He doubted it though. Some folks just never got enough.

He stopped and glanced around the parlor, but their suicide king was missing, apparently. "Where's the wonderbrat?" he asked nonchalantly.

Aristotle glanced up, hooked his thumb around backwards toward the library.

"No s.h.i.t?" Book b.u.t.toned up his coat to the chin. "What's he doing in there? He got a pit barbecue going with the Father's favorite texts, or what?"

Aristotle took a drag on his cigarette like he was insulted or something. He smiled to conceal a cough. A one- time geekazoid health-nut, he'd only taken up smoking last year when he joined the Coven and discovered smoking couldn't put him in a casket. "He's reading. Researching his psi." He sniffed the air, a bit overdramatically, but it wasn't his own smoke he was smelling. "You know?" he said with those bushy upraised Grocho-brows Alek always joked about, "Something some of us need to do?"

Book held up his hands. "Hey, man, no damage done." He plucked a cig out of his own coat pocket and lit up, thankful that the Father had never had fire detectors installed in the Covenhouse. Between Totty and himself and his psi--Jesus, but they'd be busy.

"Naw, you're way off," Book heard Aristotle say, and he almost thought the geek was speaking to him, but it was mute Robot he was addressing. Robot signed back angrily with fingers as thick around as bratwursts and yet so nimble it was a near-miraculous display of talent. He pointed to something on the McNally computer- map. Tapped it. Me right, you wrong.

Booker headed for the foyer, but Aristotle surprised him. "Hey...Book?"

Booker turned around. A shock of heat floated up through his body and came out his nostrils. It could have been Frenched cig smoke but it smelled like a human rotisserie. No one called him Book, except his very closest friends. Alek. A few others. A very few others. "What?"

Aristotle looked taken aback, then recovered and motioned him closer. You don't reeeeally want me closer, whitebread, do you? Guess so. Book obliged him with a look of pure menace. "Settle something for us,"

Aristotle said, showing him the monitor. "I say the rogue shows up at the Metropolitan next, Robey says Rockefeller Center. What do you think?"

Book looked at them both. "How'd you come up with these two locals, Sherlocks?"

Aristotle fixed his gla.s.ses. "Well, that Byron fellow, he hid the Chronicle, right? And he was that Debra's thing, right?"

"He was never 'Debra's'," Book said.

"But the Father said--"

"The Father is wrong. Debra was Alek's. Only Alek's."

"Jesus." Aristotle frowned, then recomposed himself. "Anyway, Byron worshipped her, right?"

Book nodded. We all did. Especially Alek. And now you're paying the price of that worship, aren't you, brother? Alek, where the h.e.l.l are you?

"And her favorite spots were the Metro and the Rockefeller Center skating rink. So natch, that's the most likely places, right? Except that the Metro is really more likely"--he glanced up self-righteously at silent, glowering Robot filling up his seat--"because Alek can't skate."

Booker shook himself, tried to digest this bizarre logic. But what did you expect from this little whitebread wusshead who'd probably go into apoplectic shock if you took his computer away for a day? "Because he can't skate?" he parroted incredulously.

Aristotle blanched. "Well...he can't."

"How," Book asked, "do you know Alek can't skate? You best buds or somethin'? You hang with him, white boy?"

"No! It's just...I never saw him."

Booker laughed nastily and leaned in close to the whelp. "Alek could watch you screw the brains out of your girlfriend if he chose to, Totty, and you wouldn't know jack s.h.i.t about it. He could kick your a.s.s so hard you'd cough up your own heart. And here's the rub--" he leaned in even closer, until the whelp could feel his heat and sweat it--"he can slay slayers. You think a little thing like skating is beyond him? Hmm?"

Aristotle swallowed, said nothing. Booker reached out and petted him on the head like a dog, then took a handful of his scrawny, three-inch ponytail. Tight. Tighter. Until he saw tears gleam in Aristotle's eyes behind his c.o.ke-bottle-bottom gla.s.ses. Book showed the whelp his teeth. "Leave Alek the f.u.c.k alone." He glanced up at Robot sitting so piously. Like himself and Alek, Robot was an elder, and deserving of more respect than this. But right now, G.o.dd.a.m.nit, Book felt a thousand years anyone's elder. He said, "I will tell you this once and only once. Next time you find out on your own: When you fight Alek you fight the Father."

Then he left the parlor behind with the two of them dumbstruck and staring after him. And made a point of slamming the door of the Covenhouse behind him. Hard.

It was another typical Braxton show. Awash in the Bette Davises and penguin men he moved, sipping nothing in pa.s.sing, nodding at none of the empty comments and praises, the de facto center of attraction, if for no other reason than because he looked like none of them. He looked like what he was, instead. A tramp.

A rogue. A rumpled, longhaired, underslept slayer. He looked like h.e.l.l itself, and the crones who haunted these parties to see and be seen turned away as he approached, their diamonds still burning his eyes. He had thought of waiting until after the show, but, Jesus, they didn't have that much time left. Not anymore. Not with Amadeus so close. With the Stone Man practically on their heels these days. Braxton would have to find time for them, even if this was a show he'd scheduled for over two years or more.

Hot in here. As usual. Alek undid his coat and stopped a waiter tricked out in a black tux like some cheap Hammer film-style vampire, said, "Do you know where Charles is?"

"Charles, sir?" came the hesitant, heavy-lidded, Jeevesque reply. The boy looked positively puzzled.

Alek shook him. "Charles Braxton. The man who employs you?"

More querulous frowns from the boy. Alek decided not to push his luck anymore. He let the boy go. If he intimidated the waiter, the kid was liable to call security, and then there would be serious trouble to contend with. Too late, old man. Already he saw a couple of plainclothesmen swimming toward him through the crowd like a pair of idle hammerheads. Holding up his hand in a sign of surrender, he backed out of the room.

Apparently deciding he was more than a minor threat to aesthetics, they followed him out to the alley. They looked a little unreal, these two. Sort of like Abbot and Costello doing the Keystone Kops thing. Abbot's magnum was real enough, though. He stepped through the back door and put it in Alek's face while Costello with his paunch and self-satisfied looks unclipped the police ban radio disguised as a cell phone hanging on his belt.

"You don't want to do that," Alek said.

"I don't wanna kick your a.s.s between your teeth, boy," Abbot answered in a northern redneck drawl that did little to support his Bud Abbot image, "and I won't, jest long as you stay right there. Here?"

Alek grabbed the gun and turned it on the man, the man's hand still attached to it. The wristbones sounded as noisy as a kid smashing down a bowl of corn flakes with a spoon. Abbot screamed hoa.r.s.ely. Costello pulled out his own little cannon. And maybe he wasn't a slo-mo hick, maybe he was a born-and-bred city boy the same as Alek, but that didn't make him quick. Nothing could, just right then. Alek mule kicked him in the groin, doubling him over and sending him into the side of a Dumpster with a hollow thump.

Costello groaned, scrabbling at the asphalt and his lost toy. Teresa stepped out of the shadows of the Dumpster and gripped him by the back of the coat, bashed the back of his skull against the side of the Dumpster again. Finally, Costello slumped down into dreamland.

Abbot continued to wail irritatingly. Alek wrenched him over so the man flipped onto his back on the pavement. He put his booted foot over the man's face and was just about to rub it out like old cabbage when the voice at the mouth of the alley caught his attention.

"Don't do that to Lenny. He's slow, but loyal."

Alek looked up.

The woman stood there like a stark black Elvira outline burning against the streetlights of Madison Avenue.

Alek tried to put the voice together with the outline and failed horribly. Presumably the woman had followed him here from the party, and that meant she knew him or had business with him. For a moment, from the angle of the outline, the easy, angled curves, he almost expected Akisha to step forward, fully reformed and beautifully alive. But then the figure shifted, coming a series of steps closer, and Alek finally recognized the woman.

Not Akisha. Not one of his own. Mrs. Tahlia Braxton chuckled a little in that gravelly Lauren Becall voice of hers like he had said something witty or wise and took a long drag from off her cigarette. She Frenched it as she came over to study her downed man. Charles's powerful wife was dressed in an outfit typical of her style, a white linen jumpsuit bare at the throat and arms, a torc of silver with a red tiger's eye at its center around her naked throat. No coat or stole. Alek thought she must be frozen to the pavement, but she showed nothing of discomfort as she prodded Abbot in the side with one white designer boot. The boots were platformed-heeled, then again, Mrs.

Braxton stood nearly as tall as Alek himself; the heels must make her feel like a giant.

He had only met the White Bird as they called her once or twice at these parties, but each time he had come away with the feeling that Braxton's better half was just that--smarter, suaver, a regular iron hand in a silk glove. Now was no different.

"Get up, Lenny, and take Morton down to Emergency."

When Lenny did nothing and only continued to stare up at the two of them with lemur-eyed fear, Mrs.

Braxton tossed her cigarette aside and lifted her eagle-eyed attention on Alek. "Get this sot to his feet?"

"Sure." Alek got Abbot up, trying not to make it look like too easy a task. G.o.d knows what she'd already seen; he didn't need her asking him where all his Superman strength came from. Between himself and Teresa they managed to get the Keystone Kops to the curb and Mrs. Braxton's waiting limo.

Mrs. Braxton directed her driver to St. Mary's, then shivered and turned, opened the silver monogrammed cigarette case in her pocket and lit a filterless smoke. She rubbed at her arms, seeming to feel the cold at last.

"Look, Mrs. Braxton--"

"Tahlia."

"Tahlia," Alek said, "This is a mess."

Tahlia shrugged like it was no big deal.

"I'm just trying to find Charles. I--"

"Dead."

Something jumped inside of Alek. "Charles is dead?"

"For the last fifteen years. Haven't you noticed, dear?" With peaked eyebrows, Tahlia headed up the steps of the Metro, her heeled boots clopping on the stone stairs of the Beaux-Arts structure crouching above them like a lost temple out of some Greek mythology.

A temple. And his last hope. The last marked spot on Byron's f.u.c.king map...

Alek dogged her. Didn't know why. It just seemed that he'd met somebody forgiving enough to know the score around here. Maybe Tahlia knew even more that her cantankerous husband. Or maybe it was just desperation. Probably it was desperation. Alek thought about Teresa's words this evening as they left the rectory of the church with its bloodred candles and pale saints and haunted priest. One last hope, mio caro.

One last hope...

Tahlia turned to face him at the top. "Yeah?" she asked with her brusque Long Island diffidence.

"I...don't know how to put this," Alek said.

Tahlia's eyes narrowed. An older woman, but she had the most ageless face Alek had ever seen on a mortal.

He reminded himself that next to nothing happened in this town without Tahlia Braxton's approval. She was quite literally a one-woman mob, probably capable of committing murder itself and getting away with it. And here he was, begging her interest.

He said, after a long breath, "I really don't know how to ask you this, but do you--can you--I--"

"We were lovers, Byron and I," she said.

For a moment the world itself took a half-turn around him. He looked out at the rough beginnings of a savage midwinter's storm gathering in the form of chrome-colored clouds above, the missions and soup kitchens locked tight against the night on distant 79th Street, wondering when the world had gone another level of crazy around him. Finally, he looked again at Tahlia. He swallowed, felt the curious edges of fate or coincidence brush past his shoulder like a wing. "Excuse me?"

Another cigarette. Suddenly he saw the worry and the past, some secret sorrow, take root in Tahlia's storm grey eyes. She said, "This--it's about Byron, right?"

Alek shivered, but not from fear. "How do you know that? Or dare I ask that question?'

"You dare," she answered him levelly. "But dare ask it in the warmth of Charles's office, won't you? I'm freezing my a.s.s off here."

He nodded. But just as he did so, just as he was about to follow Tahlia inside to discover her secrets, another shiver. And then a dark, bone-slender figure moved out from behind one of the Corinthian columns at the other end of the museum. It had begun to snow. The figure stood maybe a hundred feet away, but even were the storm a living holocaust of white, he would have been able to identify it alone by its feral, saintlike posture. With a tip of his head the man started down the wide Roman steps.

Alek said, to Tahlia, "Will you give me a moment?"

Without a word or change of expression, Tahlia walked away, toward the wide double doors of the Metro. A bellboy ushered her inside. No answer. But her posture, the turn of her shoulders, said a universe of things.

Be quick. We have much to discuss. Teresa started toward him, but he held up a hand. Wait for me? She nodded and he turned back.

Booker, standing on a step halfway down the stairwell, sank his hands into his coat pockets and looked over his shoulder at the banners hanging on the face of the Metro. He sighed as Alek approached, his breath pluming in the near-dark.

A moment of silence pa.s.sed, and then another. And then he said, "I remember a time when we stood at a window and you shouted at me, and I think the entire house shook for you." He laughed. "I even remember your face, your expression, that Brooklyn-born don't-the- f.u.c.k-get-in-my-way look you were wearing.

Funny the things we remember most."

"I don't have a sword," Alek said, stopping a step below his brother, their gazes even.

"But the house shook. It was yours. It was always yours."

"The house was his, Book."

Booker sighed once more, looked at him, past him. His flesh was beaded with the sweat of his unreleased energy. Alek watched the falling snow melt off his face and shoulders in tiny, running rivulets of moisture.

He was an island of suffocating warmth in the midst of the cold night. "Do you really believe I want to kill you, brother?" he asked.

"Yeah."

Book laughed miserably and the heat was gone. "Should know better than to try and outfeel an empath. You f.u.c.kers know other folks' feelings better than your own."

"But you won't do it. Yet."

Book snorted, looked away. "I should. I'm really thinking about it, Alek."